Rescue Mission: How Peace Walker Salvaged Metal Gear's Reputation

After the roller coaster ending of Sons of the Patriots, you couldn't blame the most ardent Metal Gear fan for feeling emotionally drained. MGS4 had a grand mission to accomplish: the narrative needed to tie up all the loose ends of the series and put Solid Snake's story to rest. The creators at Kojima Productions accepted this challenging task and delivered a finale that beat players over the head with a barrage of curtain calls. As great as it was to see so much closure for the core cast of Metal Gear Solid, this approach left players in an unfamiliar state where they were happy to say goodbye to Solid Snake and crew. But a bigger question lingered after the close of MGS4: Where could the next game in the series possibly go?
(Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, PS3, PSP, Xbox 360)

How did i salvage its reputation? MGS has always been great and MGS 4 was the end for SOLID snake , And there's many stories from big boss that can be told so i hope MGS5 shows when Solid Snake was cloned.

It's one of those hit grabbing headlines. The actual article is well written. I think he's mainly referencing the way peace walker rewarded non-leathal kills whereas 4 didn't really have any repercussions for killing. Maybe also that Peace Walker is a game first and foremost whereas 4 is more of a homage to the fans.

Although I don't understand this - "considering the series' complicated history with controls"... MGS is not well known for having complicated controls. I expected the link to explain but it just redirects to the same page. Not sure what the writer has experienced but MGS controls have never been a problem for me :S

For "complicated controls", the author has a point, although an MGS vet simply deals with it:

In MGS3, for instance, in order to interrogate someone, you have to come behind them, LIGHTLY press square (a full press will slit their throat), then press R3. If you want to hold out your gun and use them as a body shield, you have to hold square lightly and press R1 (I think) to aim, and them R2 to shoot.

Complicated controls for a complicated game. I think people take for granted the "contextual button press" actions in MGS4 and Peace Walker. The older MGS games forces you to use complex button combos.

He is mainly talking about Portable Ops I presume (since he mentions the series's PSP history) because that was a headache to play through at times, trying to control the camera just to see your near proximity and do anything else at the same time was almost impossible, at least for me it was.

In MGS2 you play the vast majority of the game as Raiden, in MGS3 you spend the whole game playing as Big Boss, and in Portable Ops, Peace Walker, and most likely whatever the next MGS game is (going on the art "propaganda" that KP released about it). If Snake is MGS then all of the above games meant nothing I presume?

@Sly-Famous: No I don't know what you mean. There have only been 2 games in the MGS series with Solid Snake as the main character and only 3 with him playable in any form, and the Snake of MGS4 was nothing like the Snake of MGS1 or MGS2 (but that's besides the point). The "Solid" in Metal Gear Solid doesn't stand for Solid Snake, ya know.